SUNDAY NATION April 13, 2014 OPINION | George Kegoro It’s time to be magnanimous in enforcing the law L ast week’s expedition into Eastleigh, where the government rounded up a Memories: Last week’s expedition was an act of mass punishment against the Somali community, reminiscent of the Wagalla massacre reported 4,000 suspicious individuals, who were then moved into a stadium for screening, is the most daring urban security operation since 1982, when loyalist soldiers who had crushed an attempted coup embarked on a house-to-house operation in the affected neighbourhood to flush out the vanquished coup makers. It is too early to tell what the long-term consequences of this operation will be. The government hopes that it will herald a new era of urban security, particularly in the troubled Eastleigh district, where there has been a concentration of terrorist attacks since Kenya’s military incursion into Somalia in 2010. By all indications, the Eastleigh security operation enjoys popular support, perhaps because the public considers it proportionate to an increasingly difficult urban security setting, and also to years of unchecked illegal migration from Somalia to Kenya, with which forms of terrorism are now associated. At the political level, support for the Eastleigh operation is mixed, and while the mainstream of the Jubilee Coalition has supported the action, a section of the coalition, led by Majority National Assembly Leader Aden Duale, considers the situation as constituting harassment on ethnic and religious grounds. What should people make of the Eastleigh operation? The authorities have tolerated years of illegal migratory activities from Somalia into Kenya and the Eastleigh neighbourhood has become a major host for some of the illegal immigrants. Other forms of criminality now ride on the Eastleigh situation and, for example, the then Permanent Secretary for Internal Security, Mr Francis Kimemia, announced a task force that was supposed to verify claims that proceeds of piracy were responsible for a Somali takeover of the property market in that neighbourhood. It is not known whether the task force ever materialised or what its findings were. The thriving economy in Eastleigh is partly supported by forms of racketeering, including tax evasion and underground money changing. Secondly, law enforcement is known to have established corrupt rent-seeking opportunities in the area which, in exchange for bribes, are prepared to overlook illegal immigration. Indeed, the Eastleigh operation itself had claims of corruption, that some of those arrested in the swoop were released unconditionally after paying bribes. Going forward, and as is already widely acknowledged, a degree of integrity in law enforcement will be necessary, or the country will remain unable to discharge the most basic law enforcement responsibilities, leave alone against the complex acts of terrorism. The second issue is the manner in which the government chose to respond to the problems that Eastleigh represents. It has been reported that as part of the operation, ethnic Somalis, a visible minority, were required to prove that they were Kenyans using a number of tests, some of them inherently subjective. When, in 2012, the then MP for Embakasi, Ferdinand Waititu, proposed that Maasai people be expelled from Kayole because they were associated with rising crime in the area, he received universal condemnation, including by the TNA leadership, which publicly disowned the politician even though he was important for the party, at a time of looming elections. An example from the recesses of Kenyan history has also been mobilised to provide context to Ethnic Somalis were required to prove they are Kenyans using some very subjective tests.” ‘‘ OPINION | Peter Kagwanja How Kenya fiddled as jihad came to our country W hat is the name of Muhammad’s mother,” shouted one of the Policy: Kenya’s open door policy towards refugees after the fall of Said Barre enabled dozens of high ranking Somali Salafis to enter the country. Jihadists in the September 21, 2013 Westgate terrorist attack that claimed 67 lives, pointing a gun at a Kenyan of Indian descent. Unable to say “Aminah bint Wahb”, he was shot — because he was not a Muslim. It was the Pan-Africanist W.E.B. du Bois who aptly remarked that the problem of the 20th century was the “colour line” (racism and colonialism). It is becoming clear that the problem of the 21st century Kenya is the “faith line” (religious extremism). Three developments have thrust the faith line to the centrestage of the security discourse in Kenya. The orgy of deadly attacks by Islamic extremists on churches and worshippers is widening the fault line between Kenya’s 82.5 per cent Christians and 11.1 per cent Muslims. Baby Satrine Osinya – who survived a delicate medical operation after a jihadist’s bullet that killed his mother, Veronica Osinya, during a terrorist attack at a church in the Likoni area of Mombasa was lodged in his head for weeks – has become iconic of the fear and hope wrought by the brutality of Kenya’s new age of jihadism. The killing of the fiery cleric, Sheikh Abubakar Shariff alias Makaburi – who publicly praised violence, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab and justified the Westgate terror – in Mombasa early this month has also impaired relations between the two faiths. Meanwhile, the on-going wide- sweeping security operation to tame the spiralling insecurity and contain terrorism – code-named “Operation Usalama Watch” – especially in Mombasa and Nairobi has stoked a deadly bout of Somali ethno-nationalism. But the power elite is fiddling as Kenya burns. Where behindthe-scenes “quiet diplomacy” would have addressed genuine grievances of Kenya’s ethnic Somalis, sensational “mega-phone diplomacy” is adding fuel to the embers of conflict. Early this month, National As- sembly Majority Leader and the highest ranking Somali leader in the government, Aden Duale, threatened to withdraw support for the government over what he termed arbitrary arrests of “his people”. ‘‘ While the grievances Duale articulated might be genuine, his sentiments carry the eerie echoes of Somali ethno-nationalism that shored up the “Shifta War” in the 1960s. Notably, prior to the current radicalisation, Kenya came through as a “collateral damage” rather than a target of terrorism. This was the case with the Norfolk Hotel bombing in December 1980; the bombing of the US Nairobi Embassy in 1998; the attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in 2002 and the abortive shooting of an Israeli airliner at the Moi International Airport, Mombasa. With Westgate and a series of attacks, Jihad has come to Kenya. Therefore, a long view of radicalisation is central to effectively combating terrorism in Kenya and the region. Sadly, the dominant narrative is feeding on myths and fallacies reflective of the larger propaganda environment in which radicalisation is unfolding. One such myth is that radicali- Soft power needed to win the hearts, souls and minds of Muslim majority. sation is a response to the entry of the Kenya Defence Forces into Somalia in October 2011 and the presence of over 4,000 Kenyan troops in Amisom. But the question is why Ethiopia, which has soldiers inside Somalia, is not a soft target for jihadists. The architecture of terror Unlike Ethiopia, which has wielded a heavy stick against Islamic militants at home and abroad, Kenya is paying the price for decades of fiddling as the tide of radicalisation grew steadily from the 1960s through the 1970s. Following decades of neglect, jihadists erected a sturdy architecture of radicalisation that is progressively replacing the traditionally moderate Sufist branch of Islam prevalent in Eastern Africa with an external and more radical Salafist Islamic order. Since the 60s, Kenya dithered as its Sufi sheiks went to Saudi Arabia, supported radical Salafist religious institutions in Sudan and Somalia, only to return home as Salafis. At home, such Salafist insti- tutions as the Kisauni Islamic Centre in Mombasa, funded by the Saudis in the 1970s, evolved as the hub of radicalisation where radical clerics like Aboud Rogo were trained. Kenya’s open door policy towards refugees after the fall of Siad Barre in 1991 enabled dozens of high-ranking Somali Salafis to enter the country as refugees where they served as agents of radicalisation. Moderate Sufist clerics have received no government support against Somali Salafists, who have taken over their mosques and dislodged them in the halls of religious power and influence. Al-Shabaab’s agents prioritised the taking over of mosques as the basic units of radicalisation, mobilisation and recruitment. Al-Shabaab tacticians have profiled 368 mosques within Mombasa, 136 in its environs and between 100 and 130 mosques in the Eastleigh area alone for takeover by radical Islamic clerics. “Instead of building their own institutions, they [Somali Salafists] began taking over ours and indoctrinating our members,” lamented a senior official of the largely Sufi Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims. Fazul Mohammed of the Asso- ciation of Muslim Organisations in Kenya estimates that between 15 pc and 20 p.c. of mosques in Mombasa and Nairobi have so far fallen into the hands of militants. But Al-Shabaab was also able to set up its own outposts in the Muslim Youth Centre in Nairobi’s slum of Majengo to indoctrinate and recruit fighters. Ultimately, radicalisation is an ideological issue that requires the innovative technologies of “soft power” to win the hearts, souls and minds of the Muslim majority and effectively isolate and dislodge extremists from the halls of power and influence. Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute. pkagwanja@gmail.com the Eastleigh situation: During the State of Emergency in 1952, members of the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru communities, suspected to be Mau Mau terrorists, were rounded up and placed in concentration camps. The Eastleigh operation is similar to the Waititu incident and the British colonial practices before that. Even Duale, a strong supporter of the group in power, has found himself defending the principles that the Eastleigh incident threatens, although his position is probably only motivated by primordial concern for his ethnic community. So what should be the way forward now? The answer to this question can be found in one of Aesop’s fables. According to the fable, a contest for supremacy emerged between the sun and the wind, with each claiming that it was the greatest. The two then agreed that the greater element would be the one that made a man that was walking on the road to remove his coat and rest under a tree. Sunday Review 21 The wind went first, sending a blast of cold, violent air in the man’s direction, which only made him fasten onto his coat and walk faster along his way. The wind gave up, and it was the turn of the sun to try and make the man remove his coat. The sun shone invitingly and the man came out to bask. Before long he was sweating, removed his coat and sat under a tree. “Look at that!” cried the sun. “Because I turned the warmth of my rays upon him, the man has come to a halt, taking off his cloak and seeking shelter under a tree. That proves I am the most powerful!” Kenya has yet to embrace the lesson of how much law enforcement that is based on magnanimity can achieve, and how injurious the opposite of that can be. Further, Kenya’s new Constitu- tion means that the country has chosen the difficult path of discipline under a system of rights and due process. Under that system, all law enforcement action must be founded on evidence. Last week’s expedition is an act of mass punishment against the Somali community, reminiscent of the Wagalla massacre against the same community, and Kenya’s colonial history. It has no place in Kenya’s new constitutional order. gkegoro@gmail.com